The Lifecycle of Software Objects

by Ted Chiang

  “It’s nice to see you two together again. Have you guys made up?”

  “No!” says Polo. “Still angry.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “Both us want your help,” says Marco.

  “Okay, what can I do?”

  “Want you roll back us last week, before big fight.”

  “What?” This is the first time he’s ever heard of a digient requesting to be restored from a checkpoint. “Why would you want that?”

  “I want not remember big fight,” says Marco. “I want be happy, not angry,” says Polo.

  “You want us be happy, right?”

  Derek opts not to get into a discussion about the difference between their current instantiations and instantiations restored from a checkpoint. “Of course I do, but I can’t just roll you back every time you have a fight. Just wait a while, and you won’t be so angry.”

  “Have waited, and still angry,” says Polo. “Fight big big. Want it never happen.” As soothingly as he can, Derek says, “Well, it did happen, and you’re going to have to deal with it.”

  “No!” shouts Polo. “I angry angry! Want you fix it!”

  “Why you want us stay angry forever?” demands Marco.

  “I don’t want you to stay angry forever, I want you to forgive each other. But if you can’t, then we’ll all have to live with that, me included.”

  “Now angry at you too!” says Polo.

  The digients storm off in different directions, and he wonders if he’s made the right decision. It hasn’t always been easy raising Marco and Polo, but he’s never rolled them back to an earlier checkpoint. This strategy has worked well enough so far, but he can’t be certain it will keep working.

  There are no guidebooks on raising digients, and techniques intended for pets or children fail as often as they succeed. The digients inhabit simple bodies, so their voyage to maturity is free from the riptides and sudden squalls driven by an organic body’s hormones, but this doesn’t mean that they don’t experience moods or that their personalities never change; their minds are continuously edging into new regions of the phase space defined by the Neuroblast genome. Indeed, it’s possible that the digients will never reach “maturity”; the idea of a developmental plateau is based on a biological model that doesn’t necessarily apply. It’s possible their personalities will evolve at the same rate for as long as the digients are kept running. Only time will tell.

  Derek wants to talk about what just happened with Marco and Polo; unfortunately, the person he wants to talk to isn’t his wife. Wendy understands the possibilities for the digients’ growth, and recognizes that Marco and Polo will become more and more capable the longer they’re cared for; she simply can’t generate any enthusiasm about that prospect. Resentful of the time and attention he devotes to the digients, she would consider their request to be rolled back the perfect opportunity to suspend them for an indefinite period.

  The person he wants to talk to is, of course, Ana. What once seemed a groundless fear of Wendy’s has come true; he has definitely developed feelings for her beyond friendship. It’s not the cause of the problems he’s having with Wendy; if anything, it’s a result. The time he spends with Ana is a relief, a chance for him to enjoy the digients’ company unapologetically. When he’s angry he thinks it’s Wendy’s fault for driving him away, but when he’s calm he realizes that’s unfair.

  The important thing is that he hasn’t acted on his feelings for Ana, and he doesn’t plan to. What he needs to focus on is reaching an accord with Wendy regarding the digients; if he can do that, the temptation that Ana poses should pass. Until then, he ought to reduce the amount of time he spends with Ana. It’s not going to be easy: given how small the digient-owner community is, interaction with Ana is inevitable, and he can’t let Marco and Polo suffer because of this. He’s not sure what to do, but for now, he refrains from calling Ana for advice and posts a question to the forum instead.

  Chapter Five

  Another year passes. Currents within the mantle of the marketplace change, and virtual worlds undergo tectonic shifts in response: a new platform called Real Space, implemented using the latest distributed-processing architecture, becomes the hot-spot of digital terrain formation. Meanwhile Anywhere and Next Dimension stop expanding at their edges, cooling into a stable configuration. Data Earth has long been a fixture in the universe of virtual worlds, resistant to growth spurts or sharp downturns, but now its topography begins to erode; one by one, its virtual land masses disappear like real islands, vanishing beneath a rising tide of consumer indifference.

  Meanwhile, the failure of the hothouse experiments to produce miniature civilizations has caused general interest in digital lifeforms to dwindle. Occasionally curious new fauna are observed in the biomes, a species demonstrating an exotic body plan or a novel reproductive strategy, but it’s generally agreed that the biomes aren’t run at a high enough resolution for real intelligence to evolve there. The companies that make the Origami and Faberge genomes go into decline. Many technology pundits declare digients to be a dead end, proof that embodied AI is useless for anything beyond entertainment, until the introduction of a new genomic engine called Sophonce.

  Sophonce’s designers wanted digients that could be taught via software instead of needing interaction with humans; toward that end, they’ve created an engine that favors asocial behavior and obsessive personalities. The vast majority of the digients generated with the engine are discarded for their psychological malformations, but a tiny fraction prove capable of learning with minimal supervision: give them the right tutoring software and they’ll happily study for weeks of subjective time, meaning that they can be run at hothouse speeds without going feral. Some hobbyists demonstrate Sophonce digients that outperform Neuroblast, Origami, and Faberge digients on math tests, despite having been trained with far less real-time interaction. There’s speculation that, if their energies can be directed in a practical direction, Sophonce digients could become useful workers within a matter of months. The problem is that they’re so charmless that few people want to engage in even the limited amounts of interaction that the digients require.

  #

  Ana has brought Jax along with her to Siege of Heaven, the first new game continent to appear in Data Earth in a year. She shows him around the Argent Plaza, where players congregate and socialize in between missions; it’s a massive courtyard of white marble, lapis lazuli, and gold filigree located on top of a cumulonimbus cloud. Ana has to wear her game avatar, a kestrel-cherub, but Jax keeps his traditional copper robot avatar.

  As they’re strolling amongst the other gamers, Ana sees the onscreen annotation for a digient. His avatar is a hydrocephalic dwarf, the standard avatar for a Drayta: a Sophonce digient who’s skilled at solving the logic puzzles found on the gaming continents. The original Drayta’s owner trained him using a puzzle generator pirated from the Five Dynasties continent on the Real Space platform, and then released copies to the public domain. Now so many gameplayers take a Drayta with them on their missions that game companies are considering major redesigns.

  Ana directs Jax’s attention to the other digient. “See the guy over there? He’s a Drayta.”

  “Really?” Jax has heard about Draytas, but this is the first one he’s met. He walks over to the dwarf. “Hi,” he says. “I’m Jax.”

  “Wanna solve puzzles,” says Drayta.

  “What kind puzzles you like?”

  “Wanna solve puzzles.” Drayta is getting anxious; he runs around the waiting area.

  “Wanna solve puzzles.”

  A nearby gamer wearing a osprey-seraph avatar pauses in his conversation to point a finger at Drayta; the digient freezes in midstep, shrinks to a icon, and snaps into one of the gamer’s belt compartments as if pulled by an elastic.

  “Drayta weird,” says Jax.

  “Yes he was, wasn’t he?”

  “All Draytas like that?”

  “I think so.”

 
; The seraph walks over to Ana. “What kind of digient have you got? Haven’t seen his sort before.”

  “His name’s Jax. He runs on the Neuroblast genome.”

  “Don’t know that one. Is it new?”

  One of the seraph’s teammates, wearing a nephilim avatar, comes by. “Nah, it’s old, last generation.”

  The seraph nods. “Is he good at puzzles?”

  “Not really,” says Ana.

  “So what does he do?”

  “I like singing,” volunteers Jax.

  “Really? Let’s have a song, then.”

  Jax doesn’t need further encouragement; he launches into one of his favorites, “Mack the Knife” from Threepenny Opera. He knows all the words, but the tune he sings is at best a rough approximation of the actual melody. At the same time he performs an accompanying dance that he choreographed himself, mostly a series of poses and hand gestures borrowed from an Indonesian hip-hop video he likes.

  The other gamers laugh all through his performance. Jax finishes with a curtsy, and they applaud. “That’s brilliant,” says the seraph.

  Ana says to Jax, “That means he likes it. Say thanks.”

  “Thanks.”

  To Ana, the seraph says, “Not going to be much help in the labyrinths, is he?”

  “He keeps us entertained,” she says.

  “I’ll bet he does. Send me a message if he ever learns to solve puzzles, I’ll buy a copy.” He sees that his entire team has assembled.

  “Well, off to our next mission. Good luck on yours.”

  “Good luck,” says Jax. He waves as the seraph and his teammates take flight and dive in formation toward a distant valley. Ana’s reminded of that encounter a few days later, when she’s reading a discussion on the user-group forums:

  FROM: Stuart Gust

  Last night I played SoH with some people who take a Drayta on their missions, and while he wasn’t much fun, he was definitely useful to have around. It made me wonder if it has to be one or the other. Those Sophonce digients aren’t any better than ours. Couldn’t our digients be both fun and useful?

  FROM: Maria Zheng

  Are you hoping to sell copies of yours? You think you can raise a better Andro?

  Maria’s referring to a Sophonce digient named Andro, trained by his owner Bryce Talbot to act as his personal assistant. Talbot demonstrated Andro to VirlFriday, maker of appointment-management software, and got the company’s executives interested. The deal fell through after the executives got demonstration copies; what Talbot hadn’t realized was that Andro was, in his own way, as obsessive as Drayta. Like a dog forever loyal to its first owner, Andro wouldn’t work for anyone else unless Talbot was there to give orders.

  VirlFriday tried installing a sensory input filter, so each new Andro instantiation perceived his new owner’s avatar and voice as Talbot’s, but the disguise never worked for more than a couple of hours. Before long all the executives had to shut down their forlorn Andros, who kept looking for the original Talbot.

  As a result, Talbot wasn’t able to sell the rights to Andro for anywhere near what he’d hoped. Instead, VirlFriday bought the rights to Andro’s specific genome and a complete archive of his checkpoints, and they’ve hired Talbot to work for them. He’s part of a team that’s restoring earlier checkpoints of Andro and retraining them, attempting to create a version that has the same personal-assistant skills and is also willing to accept a new owner.

  FROM: Stuart Gust

  No, I don’t mean selling copies. I’m just thinking about Zaff doing work the way dogs guide the blind or sniff out drugs. My goal isn’t to make money, but if there’s something the digients can do that people are willing to pay for, it would prove to all the skeptics out there that digients aren’t just for entertainment.

  Ana posts a reply:

  FROM: Ana Alvarado

  I just want to make sure we’re clear about our motivations. It’d be terrific if our digients learned practical skills, but we shouldn’t think of them as failures if they don’t. Maybe Jax can make money, but Jax isn’t for making money. He’s not like the Draytas, or the weedbots. Whatever puzzles he might solve or work he might do, those aren’t the reason I’m raising him.

  FROM: Stuart Gust

  Yes, I agree with that completely. All I meant was that our digients might have untapped skills. If there’s some kind of job they’d be good at, wouldn’t it be cool for them to do that job?

  FROM: Maria Zheng

  But what can they do? Dogs were bred to be good at specific things, and Sophonce digients are so single minded that they only want to do one thing, whether they’re good at it or not. Neither is true for Neuroblast digients.

  FROM: Stuart Gust

  We could expose them to lots of different things and see what they have an aptitude for. Give them a liberal arts education instead of vocational training. (I’m only half kidding.)

  FROM: Ana Alvarado

  That’s actually not as silly as it might sound. Bonobos have learned to do everything from making stone cutting tools to playing computer games when they were given the chance. Our digients might be good at things that it hasn’t occurred to us to train them for.

  FROM: Maria Zheng

  Just what are we talking about? We’ve already taught them to read. Are we going to give them lessons in science and history? Are we going to teach them critical thinking skills?

  FROM: Ana Alvarado

  I really don’t know. But I think that if we do this, it’s important to have an open mind and not be skeptical. Low expectations are a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we aim high, we’ll get better results.

  Most of the user-group members are content with their digients’ current education–an improvised mixture of home-schooling, group tutoring, and eduware–but there are some who are excited by the idea of going further. This latter group begins a discussion with their digients’ tutors about expanding the curriculum. Over the course of months, various owners read up on pedagogical theory and try to determine how the digients’ learning style differs from those of chimps or human children, and how to design lesson plans that best accommodate it. Most of the time the owners are receptive to all suggestions, until the question arises of whether the digients might make faster progress if their tutors assigned them homework.

  Ana prefers that they find activities that develop skills but which the digients enjoy enough to do on their own. Other owners argue that the tutors ought to give the digients actual assignments to be completed. She’s surprised to read a forum post from Derek in which he supports the idea. She asks him about it the next time they talk.

  “Why would you want to make them do homework?”

  “What’s wrong with that?” says Derek. “Is this because you once had a mean teacher when you were a kid?”

  “Very funny. Come on, I’m serious.”

  “Okay, seriously: what’s so bad about homework?”

  She hardly knows where to begin. “It’s one thing for Jax to have ways to keep himself entertained outside of class,” she says. “But to give him assignments and tell him he has to finish them even if he doesn’t enjoy it? To make him feel bad if he doesn’t do it? That goes against every principle of animal training.”

  “A long time ago, you were the one who told me that digients weren’t like animals.”

  “Yes, I did say that,” she allows. “But they’re not tools either. And I know you know that, but what you’re talking about, it sounds like you’re preparing them to do work that they wouldn’t want to do.”

  He shakes his head. “It’s not about making them work, it’s about getting them to learn some responsibility. And they might be strong enough to take feeling bad once in a while; the only way to know is to try.”

  “Why take the chance of making them feel bad at all?”

  “It was something I thought of when I was talking with my sister,” he says. Derek’s sister teaches children born with Down syndrome. “She mentioned that some parents don’t
want to push their kids too much, because they’re afraid of exposing them to the possibility of failure. The parents mean well, but they’re keeping their kids from reaching their full potential when they coddle them.”

  It takes her a little time to get used to this idea. Ana’s accustomed to thinking of the digients as supremely gifted apes, and while in the past people have compared apes to children with special needs, it was always more of a metaphor. To view the digients more literally as special-needs children requires a shift in perspective. “How much responsibility do you think the digients can handle?”

  Derek spreads his hands. “I don’t know. In a way it’s like Down Syndrome; it affects every person differently, so whenever my sister works with a new kid, she has to play it by ear. We have even less to go on, because no one’s ever raised digients for this long before. If it turns out that the only thing we’re accomplishing with homework assignments is making them feel bad, then of course we’ll stop. But I don’t want Marco and Polo’s potential to be wasted because I was afraid of pushing them a little.”

  She sees that Derek has a very different idea of high expectations than she has. More than that, she realizes that his is actually the better one. “You’re right,” she says, after a pause. “We should see if they can do homework.”

  #

  It’s a year later, and Derek is finishing up some work before he meets Ana for lunch on a Saturday. For the last couple of hours he’s been testing an avatar modification that would change the proportions of the digients’ bodies and faces to make them look more mature. Among those owners who have opted to further their digients’ education, more and more are commenting on the incongruity between the digients’ eternally cute avatars and their increasing competence. This add-on is intended to correct that, and make it easier for the owners’ to think of the digients as more capable.